Police issue advice to hack victims

Luxembourg Police and BEE SECURE have issued advice to residents in the event their Gmail account is hacked, after a series of hacks were reported in the country.

25.01.2015

Luxembourg Police and BEE SECURE have issued advice to residents in the event their Gmail account is hacked, after a series of hacks were reported in the country.

Numerous reports have been made of hacking in which accounts are converted into Arabic and the contents copied to another.

The scammers gain victim's login details by getting them to enter their details on a false login page. Once this information is transmitted, the pirates will convert it into an Arabic account. A new address will be created on Yahoo and all incoming mails will be redirected to it.

As a result, victims may not even realise what is happening until, once copied, the contact list is deleted along with the entire inbox contents.

While the victim struggles to restore settings to the original language, scammers send phishing emails or money requests to the victims of the contact list.

If the victim resets his or her account within seven days, they will receive notification that all messages have been transferred to a yahoo account. After this time, the notification will disappear.

What if it happens to you?

If you find your Gmail account is in another language, following these steps:

-Restore your account to the original language;

-disable automatic redirection of your emails;

-change your password immediately to one with 10 characters minimum, special characters, upper and lowercase and numbers;

-restore your contact list;

-recover your lost emails;

-tell your contacts that your account has been hacked and they should not respond to an email from another email address purporting to be you;

-never enter personal data on a web page that you have opened by clicking a link in an email be wary when receiving unusual mail from a contact. A different language or writing style may suggest a hack;

-if a friend asks you to send money to help get them out of a difficult situation, it is most likely a scam;

-if you think the email account of one of your contacts has been hacked, tell him or her.